Interwar Years
The Interwar Era lasted from about 1918 AD until 1922 AD. It began with the end of World War I, and the implications of the peace settlement. It then ended with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany. The interwar era years were marked by political and economic turmoil as Europe struggled to recover from the devastation of World War I. World War I did not cause World War II, but its aftermath still caused an extreme form of embittered nationalism in several countries. While the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were extremely harsh on Germany, both Italy and Japan, despite being on the winning side, didn’t think they’d won anything like enough land or respect from the peace settlement. The devastating losses and destruction of the war shocked everyone, and turned this resentment into a form of hyper-nationalism. Meanwhile, the success of the Communist revolution in Russia prompted a reaction from the extreme right in the rise of Fascism, first seen in Italy. Yet, there were clear signs that the world was on the road to recovery from the war, when it was struck by a second devastating crisis; the Great Depression. The overconfident United States allowed unrestrained capitalism to run amuck in a boom based on easy credit that bust in a worldwide economic slump. When times were really desperate, people turn to extremist parties such as the Nazis. History Turmoil in Germany Germany was left devastated after World War I including 1.8 million deaths and 4 million wounded, as well as severe food shortages caused by the transfer of many farmers and food-workers into the military, and the British naval blockade. To this was added the humiliation of defeat, which came as a shock to the German people who had been led to believe by Wilhelm’s government that the nation was on the verge of victory. Many war veterans left the bloody battlefields, and returned to a bewildering society and an uncertain future. With the expulsion of Kaiser Wilhelm, power was handed to the elected Reichstag parliament. The assembly met in the city of Weimar rather than Berlin which was too volatile; thus it became known as the Weimar Republic (1919-33). A short-lived German Communist Soviet along Russian lines had recently been suppressed in Berlin after several days of violent street fighting and more than 1,000 deaths. The men who took control of Germany were ambitious reformers, who hoped to create a modern liberal democracy, in a nation that had known only authoritarian rule. Together they adopted one of the world’s most democratic and progressive constitutions: an executive presidency with considerable emergency powers; a chancellor head of government; a proportional voting system; universal suffrage including women over the age of twenty; and although Germany retains a federal structure, the Reichstag now had control over all areas of taxation. While admirably liberal, the proportional voting system resulted in a series of weak minority government ill-equipped to deal with the crises to come. And the use of presidential powers to resolve the frequent stalemates only worsened political divisions, in a country inexperience with democratic government. Weimar Republic under President Friedrich Ebert had little option but to reluctantly accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919). This event left a poisonous legacy, especially in the right-wing conspiracy theory that the German army had never been defeated and instead were stabbed in the back by liberals and socialists, a group to which rabble-rousers glibly add the Jews. In March 1920, the extreme right-wing Kapp Putsch coup d'état in Berlin, was only suppressed by determined resistance from the extreme left with a general strike. Yet the extreme left was no more inclined than their opponents to support the new republic. A left-wing workers' revolt in the Ruhr the same month collapsed after ferocious encounters with a right-wing volunteer militias. Both right and left saw themselves in a struggle to the death for Germany's future. The ability of both sides to recruit support was much enhanced by the behaviour of the Allies, particularly France. When Germany defaulted on its war reparation payments, French troops occupied the heavily industrialised Ruhr district in January 1923. The result was an immediate escalation of the political and economic chaos. The removal of her industrial heartland tipped the balance of the German economy, which collapsed; Germany had already been mass printing bank-notes to keep-up with the reparation payments. Inflation, which was already a major problem in post-war Germany, reached levels that beggar the imagination; prices increased 15-fold in six-months and people's life-savings were wiped-out. In November, there was another failed coup in Munich. The Beer Hall Putsch would be little more than a footnote in history, were it not for the involvement of Adolf Hitler. Yet from this lowest point in Germany's post-war chaos, the country made a remarkable recovery over the next six years; the Weimar Golden Era (1924–1929). This period of relative stability was thanks largely to the energy and diplomatic skills of foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. He set to work getting the Treaty of Versailles changed into something much more acceptable to the Germans. He made huge progress. His first success was the Dawes Plan (1924), which temporarily defused the issue of war reparations through US loans, and placing the system of payments under international control. The trauma of runaway inflation was meanwhile forcibly solved by the introduction of a new German currency, the Reichsmark. Germany's international relations were further improved by the Locarno Pact (1925), effectively a new European peace treaty guaranteeing international boundaries that Germany willingly signed, in stark contrast to the Treaty of Versailles. In the following year Germany joined the League of Nations, with a permanent seat on the council. The third in this sequence of agreements was the Young Plan (1929), which definitively established the total amount of the war reparations. While the figure remained high, Stresemann secured a highly significant concession; the withdrawal of the Allies from the Rhineland five years ahead of schedule. With this accomplished, Germany should have been well placed to take her natural place as a major power in Europe. However, October 1929 dealt Germany a disastrous blow in the Great Depression. Nowhere did it hit harder than in the newly recovered Germany. As foreign money was withdrawn, businesses crashed, wages were slashed, and unemployment soared. This seconds devastating financial crisis in just six-years was a situation in which extremist parties were certain to flourish, both the left-wing Communists and right-wing Nazi Party. United States, the Roaring Twenties, and Great Depression The United States emerged from World War I not only as a great economic and military power, but transformed from a debtor to the great creditor nation of the world; the dollar replaced the pound as the most important currency for trade. These circumstances thrust the United States into a position as world leaders, yet for the most part she retreated back into isolationism. The 1920s or the Roaring Twenties were a decade of exciting change, of social, artistic and cultural dynamism when jazz, movies, and illegal liquor bloomed, and the flappers redefined the modern look for women. The government helped business grow like gangbusters largely through lower taxes on business profits, efforts to weaken the power of unions, and shifting the country away from economic regulation. Productivity rose dramatically as older industries adopted Henry Ford's assembly line techniques, and newer industries grew to provide Americans with automobiles and new labour-saving devices like vacuum cleaners, toasters, and refrigerators. Americans had more time for leisure, and this was provided by radios, baseball games, and dance crazes like the Lindy and Charleston. But probably the most significant leisure product was movies. The American film industry had moved out to Hollywood before World War I where land was cheap and plentiful, the weather allowed shooting outside all year round, and it was close to everything; desert, mountains, and ocean. By 1925, the American industry had eclipsed all of its competitors. The '20s also saw the birth of a new phenomenon still with us today; the worship of celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino or Babe Ruth. And more and more people had money thanks to the growing acceptance of consumer debt in order to pursue the American dream. The post-war era was also the Golden Age of Mobsters. Prohibition (1920-33) came into effect, making the sale or transportation of liquors anywhere in the country illegal. With customers eager to buy it at inflated prices and drink it in clandestine Speakeasies, it proved a godsend to well-organized criminal syndicates like the Mafia. The most infamous of many violent incidents was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when the struggle between Al Capone and Bugs Moran resulted in the slaughtered of seven men with machine guns. Despite increased personal freedom and flappers and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s were in many ways a reactionary period in American history, spurred by the hyper patriotism fostered during World War I. The decade saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan who denounced immigrants, with more and more coming from predominantly Jewish and Catholic southern and eastern Europe. The government responded too with immigration restrictions based on national origin. Yet the Roaring Twenties would end with an awful hangover. The economic boom of the 1920s, led to over-confidence, easy credit, and a stock market where investors gambled heavily on share prices continuing to rise. In August the national GDP declined, and again in September, causing a gradual acceleration in the shares sold each day on Wall Street; the Wall Street Crash (1929). The market lost 11% of its value on 24 October, then stabilised. And then, Black Tuesday hit, with the market losing 25%. Over the next two and a half years, with several recoveries, the market lost 89% of its value. As U.S. banks recalled loans, Europe was dragged into the Great Depression as well, a deep international recession, characterised by the withdrawal of investment, bank failures, and rising unemployment. The statistics tell the story: US industrial production fell by 46%, foreign trade 70%, and unemployment raised six-fold. The figures were similar around the world. Despite pleas from Hoover and economists for caution, Congress passed protectionist measures that further exacerbated the crisis. Hoover’s own measures were far more effective; spending large sums on infrastructure projects to provide employment and stimulate the economy, most notable the $915 million Hoover Dam in Colorado. In the election of 1932, Hoover’s association with the Great Depression meant he stood little chance against Franklin D Roosevelt. However, while Roosevelt and his New Deal would gain all the credit for America’s recovery, it borrowed heavily from Hoover’s policies albeit on a larger scale. Paralysed from the waist down by polio, Roosevelt’s would be one of the most unusual and successful presidencies in US history. His flair for publicity was immediately evident. On his first days in office, with the nation desperate for decisive action, he seized the moment describing the reforms he had planned during the first hundred days in office; the first president to use this yardstick. The New Deal focused on what historians call the "Three Rs": distributing financial Relief for the unemployed and poor, Recovery of the economy to normal levels, and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat of the crisis. One of the largest projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority, to improve infrastructure and standards of living in Tennessee, one of areas worst hit by the depression due to years of poor land management. Many of the initiatives were educational but the main aim was the building of dams to control flooding and provide electricity, similar to the Hoover Dam. Another project, the Soil Erosion Service, took steps to cope with a period of unprecedented drought in the grain-growing plains of the Midwest, where the topsoil had been degraded to light dust causing appalling dust storms. Roosevelt also pioneered a new way for a president to communicate with the people; his fireside chats. He went on the radio and talked in an entirely relaxed and informal manner, on matters and policies that needed explaining. On 3 September 1939, his subject would be the very dark day when France and Britain declared war on Germany; World War II. Fascist Italy Although a member of the victorious allies, Britain, France, and the United States who became known as the Big Three had made contradictory agreements with other nations during the course of the war. Italy achieved her most important aim from the post-war settlement, all the Alpine passes and the city of Trieste, but Fiume and Dalmatia in the north-eastern coast of the Adriatic were granted to Yugoslavia; Wilson, in particular, refused to recognise the Treaty of London which brought Italy into the war and promised them to Italy. The Italian public believed that their leaders had failed to stand up to the Big Three and been humiliated at Versailles. In the aftermath of the successful Russian revolution, extremism was the mood of the times. With the Italian government perceived as weak and lacking pride in Italy, unrest seemed inevitable, but it was further aggravated by the economic damage done to the country in the war. As a relatively new industrial nation, the Italian economy was especially deformed by the needs of the conflict, and suffered a particularly severe post-war downturn. Italian right-wing nationalism was first seen in the crisis over Fiume, a predominantly Italian-speaking port granted to Yugoslavia. Within days of the Treaty of Versailles, Fiume was seized by a force of 300 Italian volunteers led by the flamboyant adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio. The European powers were not amused, and although it delayed from months, the Italian government eventually acted and expelled D’Annunzio from the city. Nonetheless, the example of what could be achieved with a little force and sufficient bravado did not go unnoticed by an ambitious 33-year-old Italian politician; Benito Mussolini. Before the war, Mussolini was an active revolutionary socialist, but he was expelled from the party in 1914 for supporting Italian intervention in the war on the side of the Allies. Mussolini served in the army on the front lines reaching the rank of corporal before being wounded in 1917. After the war, he devoted his energies to a new belligerent newspaper, galvanising the support of many right-wing groups and unemployed war veterans into the Italian Fascist Party in March 1919. The movement built a broad base of support around the powerful ideas of nationalism and anti-socialism, promoting protecting the class system in a strong centralised state. Violence was a natural aspect of the socialist movement, and it now became central to his own politics. At rallies, surrounded by armed thugs wearing black shirts, crowds were mesmerised by Mussolini’s vigorous and highly theatrical oratory. The government, obsessively concerned with the threat of Communism, often turned a blind eye as the Black-Shirts terrorised their political opponents. By 1921, Mussolini and thirty-five of his colleagues were elected to parliament, but elections were not to play an important part in his plans. He was given a perfect opportunity in August 1922 when the trade unions and socialists called a general strike, which was broken by gangs of Blackshirts, to the approval of much of the public. In the aftermath, Mussolini declared that the weakness of the government was allowing Italy to slip into chaos, and only he could restore order. Some 30,000 Blackshirts marched on Rome in four great columns under his closest colleagues; Mussolini himself observed the outcome of his gamble from the safety of Milan. After two days of dithering, the prime minister ordered the army to take whatever steps were necessary, but the king, fearing a civil war, refused to sign the decree. He instead invited Mussolini to Rome, hoping instead to appease the Fascists. Yet Mussolini gambled again, insisting he would only come if it was to form a Fascist government. Astonishingly, the bluff worked. Mussolini arrived in the capital on 30 October 1922, to take control of Italy. That day, the king and Mussolini stood side by side before an impressive parade of Blackshirts. Mussolini, or il Duce as he became known, moved cautiously in establishing himself as a dictator. An immediate order was given to prevent further violence by the Blackshirts, and his first cabinet included several non-Fascists. In the elections of 1924, the Fascists top the poll, winning 65% of the votes; the middle classes hoped a strong government would restore order in a society all too prone to anarchy and strikes. During the next two years, Mussolini gradually dismantled the institutions of democratic government to cement his personal rule: opposition politicians were arrested; newspapers were taken over by Fascists, and by 1926 all non-Fascist political activity was prohibited. Meanwhile, Mussolini himself held numerous cabinet portfolios, while henchmen reluctant to offer criticism held the others. As a dictator, Mussolini proved inept, although to his credit, he carried out an extensive public works program that reduced unemployment, and ran the trains on time, making him very popular with the people and an inspiration to other dictators. Yet the decrepit Italian economy was dragged down by Fascist inefficiencies even before the Great Depression hauled it deeper. Meanwhile, determined to re-establish Italy as a great European power, this modern would-be Caesar invaded Ethiopia in 1935, in defiance of the League of Nations. A brutal campaign of colonial conquest followed, in which the Italians dropped tons of poison gas upon the Ethiopian people. In May 1936, Mussolini was able to proclaim to king Victor Emmanuel III that Italy had its empire. With this minor military success, Mussolini was able to deceive himself about the country’s military capability, as another European dictator made overtures to flatter his ego; Adolf Hitler. Stalinist Russia Since the October Revolution the leadership of the Communist party and thus the nation, had been unmistakably in the hands of one man. While Trotsky was an extremely able assistant, the ruthless securing of the revolution had been Vladimir Lenin's achievement. However, the unremitting work-load took its toll, and in May 1922 he had a stroke. He recovered only to suffer a second stroke that left him an incapacitated invalid until his death in January 1924. Trotsky had long been his natural successor, but a dark horse would show astonishing ruthlessness. Joseph Stalin had been in the inner circle of the party since the revolution, but his rise to power only began in April 1922 when Lenin appointed him General Secretary of the Communist Party. Though not recognised as a significant office at the time, it gave him direct control over all appointments, a perfect opportunity to build a power base for the leadership struggle to come. During 1922, Stalin appointed some 10,000 of his supporters as provincial officials. When Lenin got back to work after his first stroke, he found that the party was effectively ruled by an uneasy triumvirate of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev. The three were united in their hatred of Trotsky, widely seen as a detached and arrogant intellectual. Keenly aware of Stalin's character and ambition, Lenin began busily trying to reinforce Trotsky's position, only to suffer his second stroke. Stalin moved quickly to take charge of Lenin’s doctors, and he effectively became Stalin’s prisoner until his death thirteen months later. While incapacitated, Lenin dictated "Lenin's Testament", a series of notes condemning Stalin which he wanted read at the Communist Party Congress (1923), but Stalin managed to largely suppress them. Meanwhile, Stalin moved cautiously against Trotsky and his partners in the triumvirate, but by 1926 he was strong enough to remove all three from the Communist executive committee and from the party the following year. Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, while Kamenev and Zinoviev were shot in the purge of 1936. Joseph Stalin would totally transform the world's first Communist nation with the same ruthlessness he’d shown to his political rivals. The First Five Year Plan (1928-32) took the civil war policy against supposedly rich peasants to new heights. The thousands of acres of land that had been given to peasants in 1917 were seized by the state to create a collective farming systems; essentially reducing the peasants back to serfs. Uncooperative peasants and their families were arrested en-masse, and either shot or transported to the barbarous conditions of labour camps in Siberia; six million are believed to have died, a tragedy barely perceived outside Russia until years later. By the end of the plan, more than 90% of Russia’s agricultural land was being farmed collectively. Government planners believe that the use of public tractors and machinery would increase the food output per peasant. However, the result was a massive drop in agricultural production: when forced to merge their smallholdings, peasants tended to slaughter their livestock rather than hand it over to the state, thus reducing the common herd; and no amount of coercion made them work with anything like their previous commitment. During the early 1930s, there were renewed famines that killed millions. It turned out to be more feasible to impose industrialisation on the backwards country; the Second Five Year Plan (1933-38). Determined to give Russia her own heavy industry, Stalin diverts production away from consumer goods, requiring the public to accept unprecedented scarcities. He secured efficiency through incentive schemes for managers and skilled workers, while some 25 million peasants were moved to the factories, as effect slave labour. Nevertheless, the policy rapidly succeeded, and by the end of the plan Russia had become a major industrial nation. The human cost of this achievement can be seen in Stalin’s prestige project; the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Of the 300,000 transported north to labour, about 200,000 died before it opened in 1933. Meanwhile, even in the tightly controlled Communist party, pockets of dissent were possible. However, by the mid-1930s Stalin felt strong enough to settle all his political scores. The Great Purge (1936-38) began with the assassination in 1934 of his one-time protégé turned rival, Sergei Kirov. Although Stalin himself almost certainly ordered it, the assassin and thirteen supposed accomplices were immediately executed. He followed this with three great annual show trials held in Moscow designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat. Trotskyite sympathies and bourgeois nationalism were the main charges against these enemies of the people. It has been estimated that 600,000 people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. During this period, the party hierarchy was purged of almost everyone who had played a part in achieving the Communist revolution. Britain In Britain as elsewhere, by the weary end of World War 1, there was hardly a street or village in Britain untouched by death. The experience of total war involving continuous effort and sacrifice from every citizen, inevitably transformed the social and political landscape of the country, especially for women. Women had been mobilised not only in their familiar role in textile mills, but also in the heavy labour of munitions factories, and by 1917, women were themselves serving in the armed forces. These changes made possible an easy conclusion to the long struggle of the Suffragettes. Before the end of the war in February 1918, the British parliament was among many that passed laws granting the vote to women and allowing female members of parliament: New Zealand had done the same in 1893, Finland in 1906 who had its first female MP a year later, Germany in 1918, the United States in 1920; and France not until 1944. Meanwhile, for the soldiers who did return from the war, the inevitable consequence of mass demobilisation was often to unemployment. Disillusionment turned to a questioning of the social order and the gulf between ruling and working classes. Worker strikes became commonplace and in 1924 Britain had her first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. The Conservatives had misjudged the electorate by running on a platform of introducing protective tariffs; free-trade had been part of the British psyche since the repeal of the Corn Laws (1815), and they had even gone to war with China over the issue just 60 years before. Nevertheless, MacDonald’s government was soon brought down by their friendly attitude to Russia, as well as the notorious Zinoviev Letter in which Russia urged the Communist party in Britain to engage in all sorts of seditious activities; generally accepted now by historians to have been a forgery. The government instability resulted in further unrest, especially in the mining industry. With the market for British coal shrinking, mine owners demanded from their workers longer hours and less pay. When the government tried to break the resulting miner’s strike, the Trades Union Congress responded by calling a general strike. Some three millions workers responded, crippling transport and all the nation’s main industries. Their action launched an extraordinary period of class confrontation with middle-class volunteers eagerly distributing food to the shops, delivering mail, and driving buses and trains. After nine days, with the mine owners making a compromise offer, the general strike was called off, although the miners themselves continued for another five bitter months before giving in. Thus, the Great Depression (1929) broke at a time when the Britain was still far from recovered from the effects of the war. In 1929 unemployment stood at more than a million or 10% of the workforce, and two year later it had doubled, with the heavy industries in the north of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland particularly severely struck. It wasn’t until 1936 that Britain made a slow modest recovery. Civil War in Ireland In Ireland, the split between the pro-treaty politicians led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, and their anti-treaty opponents under Éamon de Valera, was reflected in the former comrades of the Irish Republican Army. As the first election of new Irish Free State approached in June 1922, both sides hoped to win their case at the ballot box. In the event, the pro-treaty faction won a resounding victory; 92 of the 128 seats. With their cause slipping out of reach, in June anti-treaty republicans raised the stakes by occupying the Four Courts, the main law-court building in Dublin. With the British government threatening to intervene, Collins ended the stand-off by bombarding the building with artillery; the Irish Civil War (1922-23) had begun. There followed eight days of pitched battles in Dublin, but eventually Collins swept the anti-treaty republicans from the capital. Yet the war spreads elsewhere. With the greater fire power, victory was almost certain for the pro-treaty government; Collins received at least one shipment of 10,000 British rifles. Nevertheless, the government received two devastating blow in August 1922. Ten days after prime minister Arthur Griffith died of heart failure, Michael Collins himself was killed in an ambush near his home in County Cork. In this double crisis, William Cosgrave, a relatively unknown politician, emerged as the new prime minister. He fulfilled his new responsibilities with a surprising and effective ruthlessness. Emergency powers were secured from the Dáil and the unauthorized possession of any firearm was now punishable by death. In November the first executions took place, including noted republican Erskine Childers, found in possession of a revolver given him by Collins in more comradely times. In the six months to May 1923, the Free State government executed seventy-seven anti-treaty republicans, as well as holding some 13,000 political prisoners in detention. However, the severity worked, and de Valera instructed his faction to lay down their arms in May. By August, the situation was calm enough for new elections to be held, with the pro-treaty faction still winning a healthy majority. Meanwhile, prime minister Cosgrave hoped that the Boundary Commission (1924-25) promised in the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) would go some way towards resolving the thorny issue of Northern Ireland. The formal border of Northern Ireland was to be determined by plebiscites, and with large Catholic populations in Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Derry, the belief was that the six counties would be reduced until no longer economically viable. However, the commission collapsed with the Northern Ireland first minister refusing even to attend and Westminster insisting that the treaty envisaged no more than the adjustment of the border by a few parishes here and there. Yet Cosgrave managed to secure an advantageous financial treaty for the Irish Free State in compensation; the Irish share of the British national debt was cancelled. Nonetheless, this left a large Catholic minority now stranded in Protestant dominated Northern Ireland with ominous implications for the future. In Northern Ireland, the hard to avoid impression was that Protestant Unionists were still the natural ruling class, and in the inevitable nature of power, the result was discrimination. Much of it was real, and even more perceived. The pattern was firmly established in the case of local government, where gerrymandered ward boundaries rigged elections to ensure Unionist control of councils even where there was a Republican majority. There was widespread discrimination in employment too, particularly in the public sector, shipbuilding, and heavy engineering. The annual Orange Order parade through the city, commemorating Catholic defeat at the Battle of the Boyne (1690), was a frequent cause of tension. In 1935, the worst violence since partition convulsed Belfast, when the parade diverted from its usual route through a Catholic area; the resulting violence left nine dead, and 2,000 Catholics forced to leave their homes. France Though victorious, France suffered horrible devastation during the war, including 1.5 million deaths, and the long-term costs of 3.5 million wounded veterans, as well as crippling war debts. The flow of war reparations from Germany played a central role in strengthening French finances and a vast reconstruction program of the devastated areas, as well as a line of fortresses along the border; the Maginot Line. When Germany repeatedly defaulted on reparations, in January 1923 French troops and engineers were sent into the Ruhr valley to force German compliance or, if necessary, to collect payments by direct seizure. This caused increasing strain with Britain and the United States, who clearly now favoured a reduction of the burden in order to get Germany back on her feet. Despite a campaign of passive resistance in the Ruhr, the French did succeed in making their occupation pay, but the French financial crisis grew worse in the middle of the ‘20s due to her inefficient taxation policies plagued by widespread evasion. Yet her economic problems were not insurmountable. In 1926, Raymond Poincaré of the centre-right Bloc National was asked to return to the position of prime minister and granted extreme powers. He reformed the system of tax collection, drastically reduced government spending, and devalued the Franc which helped stabilise the currency albeit at about one-fifth of its 1914 value. As a result, France recovered her pre-war stability, prosperity, and self-confidence, and the Great Depression was relatively mild in France; unemployment peaked at under 5%. In contrast to the mild economic upheaval, the political upheaval was more significant, shifting between increasingly estranged and unstable right-wing and left-wing coalitions. Nevertheless, Paris still sparkled as the centre of the avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s: artists pushed into the new fields of Cubism and Surrealism; Le Corbusier pioneered what is now called modern architecture; foreign writers like Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald flocked to the liberal atmosphere of Paris; and nightlife established a cutting-edge reputation for everything from jazz to striptease. Road to the Spain Civil War Spain had remained neutral in World War I, allowing her with great advantage to become a supplier to both sides prompting an economic boom during the war. However, the economic slowdown in post-war Europe hit Spain particularly hard, and the country went into spiralling debt. The post-war economic difficulties heightened social unrest in Spain. The unstable, corrupt, and inefficient Spanish government seemed to have no solution to the countries unemployment, labour strikes, and poverty; from 1902 to 1923, there were 33 different governments. In 1923 a military coup brought general Miguel Primo de Rivera to power as a military dictator with the support of King Alfonso XIII. He promised to reform the country quickly and restore elections soon, however he chose to remain in power. As a dictator he proved idealistic but inept; he attempted to reduce unemployment through infrastructure projects that ran large deficits which he kept hidden, and that he paid for through public loan leading to rapid inflation. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, bankruptcy forced the king to remove the massive unpopularity Primo de Rivera from power. Nonetheless, the king himself was had been thoroughly discredited, and fled the country a year later, heightening the social tensions in Spain that would ultimately erupt in a full-scale Spanish Civil War. Middle East and Zionism The establishment of the French mandate in Syria, and British mandate in Iraq and Palestine immediately faced nationalist agitation against colonial rule: the French forcibly expelled Faisal I from Syria in 1920 when he proclaimed himself king of a Greater Syria including Iraq; the Iraqi Revolt in 1920; and the Great Syrian Revolt (1925-27). Meanwhile in this intensely complex region, a new force was on the rise; Zionism. For centuries, the idea of a Jewish return to Jerusalem had remained a distant dream. The turning point came in 1896 with the publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) by the journalist Theodor Herzl, in response to a recent and rapid increase in anti-Semitism in many parts of Europe. A bi-product of the rise of nationalism was intolerance of others, ''including minorities like the Jews and homosexuals; even liberal Britain introduced the Aliens Act (1905) to control Jewish immigration. The movement attracted more and more followers, and they finally achieved a breakthrough of great significance when the British foreign secretary was persuaded to sign the Balfour Declaration in 1917 tacitly supporting the creation of a national home for the Jewish people. This encouraged a major growth in Jewish immigration to Palestine: before the Declaration the average number of new arrivals had been about 900 per year; during the 1920s, that went up to 12,000 per year; and during the 1930s, increasing to 30,000 per year. The hardest task confronting the British mandate over Palestine was to keep the peace between the Jews and the more numerous population of Palestinian Arabs, resenting the arrival of so many foreigners and well aware of the Zionist dream of creating a state of Israel. The British also established different institutions for both ethnic group, hardening divisions but making it easier for them to "divide and rule" the people of Palestine. During the 1920s the policy of Britain in relation to these two rival communities was unclear and vacillating between encouraging Jewish immigration and strictly controlling it. Meanwhile, there was a gradual increase in the violence between Arabs and Jews, with a particularly extreme outburst occurring in 1929 that left 133 Jews dead and 87 Arabs, many of the latter by British troops trying to restore order. An Arab general strike in 1936, accompanied by a demand for an immediate end to Jewish immigration, led to another major outbreak of violence against Jews, resulting this time in 80 Jewish and`140 Arab deaths as the British struggle to maintain order. By 1938, the British were providing arms to enable outlying Jewish settlements to defend themselves, contributing significantly to the growing strength of Jewish paramilitary groups. Chinese Civil War First Phase Shortly after the revolution of 1911 that swept away the Qing Dynasty, China shattered and fell under the dominance of several regional warlords. In the 1920s, Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang (KMT) party established a revolutionary base in southern China, and set out to unite the fragmented nation. When efforts to obtain aid from the West were ignored, the KMT formed an alliance with the fledgling Chinese Communist (CPC) party in order to gain support from the Soviet Union. In the Northern Expedition (1926–1927), the army of the KMT and Communists defeated the warlords in central China, and were able to secure the nominal allegiance of the warlords in the north. Having secured nominal control over a unified China, the KMT now under Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Communists. In April 1927, Chiang initiated the Shanghai Massacre arresting and executing of hundreds CPC members and beginning the first phase of the '''Chinese Civil War' (1927-50). The Communists retreated to the south and to the countryside, where they fermented revolts like the Nanchang Uprising (August 1927) and peasant uprisings like the Autumn Harvest Uprising (September 1927) led by 33-year-old Mao Zedong. While the KMT suppressed them, these insurgent groups would come to form the core of the Communist Red Army. For the next few years, the Communists fought a guerilla war against the KMT government, and established a base in the southern Jiangxi province in 1929. In a series of ever-larger systematic encirclement campaigns the KMT gradually surrounded and engulfed the Communist controlled territories until only Jiangxi remained. In October 1934, with Jiangxi about the fall, the Communists retreated for the northwest of China, on what became known as T'he Long March'. Almost 6,000 miles through the most inhospitable regions of China, while fighting fifteen battles and many more skirmishes, and plague by hunger, disease, and desertion, the twelve months trek would earn its place in Chinese Communist mythology. Of the 90,000 men who began the march, only some 8,000 made it to the end, but the peasants and poor recruited along the way would solidifying Communism’s appeal to the masses. It also established Mao Zedong as the undisputed leader of the Communist party. They eventually settled a new base in warlord controlled Shaanxi province in October 1935. Nevertheless, the Communists and KMT factions would find themselves with common cause, and forming a united front to oppose a new threat in 1937; the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Japan Japan had enjoyed a period of economic boom during World War I: markets in which she had faced heavy Western completion were abandoned to her; and allied governments ordered great quantities of munitions from Japanese factories. Japan was undoubtedly now a world power; it had the third biggest navy in the world. Yet despite entering at the very start of the war, committing thousands of troops and millions of dollars to the war effort, she was largely ignored or treated with open distain at the peace conference in Versailles; her Racial Equality Proposal was rejected by the Big Three despite receiving a majority vote from the wider delegates. As a result, the Japanese became increasingly alienated from the Western powers. The extreme right-wing, inspired by fascism and Japanese nationalism, came to the belief that the only way to gain respect would be through force. As they and the military gained increasing influence within the government of Emperor Hirohito, Japan became determined to be the dominant power in Asia; starting with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Category:Historical Periods